This ten-week quasi-experimental study analyze whether explicit lessons of
Spanish verb conjugation has a positive effect with fourth grade students’ Spanish
fluency through accurate production of verb conjugation in the written and oral form.
Specifically, this study looked for evidence of the students’ verb conjugation production
in the students pre and post verb in isolation assessments, written narrative, and an
interview that was conducted at the end of the study. The 21 fourth grade students
attended a Spanish Immersion program located in the Northern California region.
The reason for this study is because students in Spanish Immersion Programs are
fossilizing and using incorrect Spanish verb conjurations when they speak and write.
Moreover, students are moving through the program without knowing that they are
making mistakes. The goal was to investigate if explicit instruction of Spanish past
tense verb rules through the daily mini lessons helped improve students’ Spanish oral and
written verb usage. Per DeKeyser’s Skill Acquisition Theory "skilled behaviors can become routinized and even automatic under some conditions" (Speelman, 2005, as cited
in Taie, 2014, p. 1971). “In other words, this theory assigns roles for both explicit and
implicit learning in SLA” (Taie, 2014, p. 1971). This thesis will help enhance educators’
knowledge of Second Language Acquisition to deliver appropriate grammatical lessons.
Sources of Data
Quantitative data was collected through two pre-and-post assessments in order to
see if students’ verb conjugations would improve over the course of the study. One of
the assessments analyzed the students’ verb conjugations in an isolation format. The
second assessment focused on the students’ verb conjugation in a written narrative
paragraph of a past event.
The research concluded that through daily explicit mini-lessons on verb conjugation
rules has a positive outcome within Spanish immersion students. Students are able to
build the foundation necessary to justify the conjugation of past-tense verbs, which in
return helps them develop Spanish written and verbal accuracy.

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Education (Curriculum and Instruction)

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Spanish language acquisition

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Spanish grammar-verbs

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Spanish immersion

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Using explicit Instruction of Spanish past-tense verb conjugations in a Spanish immersion classroom